This is Jonas Salk, inventor of the first polio vaccine, ending the childhood disease that had killed or crippled so many Americans — especially children — in the mid-20th century.
But Salk was important for other reasons. His approach to designing the vaccine was innovative, using a denatured version of the virus rather than a weakened version. By deactivating the Polio virus with formaldehyde, Salk made the vaccine much safer.
Salk’s vaccine also saw the first introduction of the rigorous testing procedure known as the _double-blind_, in which both patient and administrator are ignorant whether the needle contains the vaccine or the placebo. This is the gold standard now, and one of the many reasons our COVID vaccines are so safe.
In fact, Salk was decidedly against injecting children using this methodology. While the double-blind is the best at determining vaccine efficacy, it’s potential success means potential misery for the 50% of trial patients who get the placebo. It works by waiting until a certain number of people get sick from the disease and only then unveiling who actually got the real vaccine.
With the mRNA COVID vaccines, for instance, because the United States had such an apocalyptic number of infections, researchers were able to obtain the requisite number of diseased patients with blitzkrieg speed. The efficacy of these vaccines surpassed all expectations and the placebo-injected patients eventually were given the real vaccine because to do otherwise would have put them at risk.
Salk strongly suspected that his polio vaccine would work, and that waiting for children to get sick was unethical. As Salk put it, the double-blind was “a ‘beautiful’ . . . experiment over which the epidemiologist could become quite ecstatic but [which] would make the humanitarian shudder”.
The double-blind proved 80-90% effective in preventing the paralysis and severe illness caused by polio. Salk was a national hero, and very quickly millions of American children were immunized against the disease.
One final thing about Salk: he refused to even try to patent his vaccine. “There is no patent,” he told a CBS reporter. “Could you patent the sun”?
Source(s): “‘A calculated risk’: the Salk polio vaccine field trials of 1954,” BMJ 1998, Oct 31; 317 (7167): 1233-1266. Christopher Klein @History.com news, March 25, 2020 originally Oct 28, 2014, photo Getty Images, Al Fenn, The LIFE picture collection. Also, Paul Offit, @TWiV (This Week in Virology), episode 844. Highly recommended interview btw.
